Category: English 2011

Nature continues to give us some strong wake up calls!

We hold all of life in our hearts and prayers as the tornadoes in the Southeast of the United States continue to create a great deal of destruction.

It is important for all of us in our global community to remember that we all are connected to a web of life. As we continue to watch such transition throughout the world, we are all being affected as we are all connected.

We must continue to do our spiritual work and to find ways to drop into our inner wisdom and listen to the messages that we are being given during this intense time of change.

And as we remember that we are connected to a web of life please acknowledge that every change in consciousness we make does ripple through the entire web of life.

Part of our spiritual work is learning how to respond to all that is happening in our lives and on the planet in ways that support the changes being asked of us. And we must continue to learn how to live in a conscious way. So together let’s continue to explore what that means for each of us.

As I read what people send around on the Internet and as I travel and lecture to groups, I am struck by how much conversation goes on about our potential.

And I am led to wonder when do we stop talking about our potential and do the work that leads to the healing that is needed right now?
Of course, life is a process of growth with no end to where we can evolve.

But at the same time all life is calling for us to be still and use the spiritual healing gifts we were all born with right now.

If you have been engaged in a spiritual healing practice you have witnessed miraculous healings. In my thirty years of practicing shamanic healing, I have witnessed cures of cancer and other life-threatening illnesses that I never thought possible. I have been a part of groups who focus together on a life-threatening illness of a friend or member in the community and have seen how the illness miraculously disappeared baffling doctors who could not explain the change.

What is blocking the manifestation of our potential and how do we move forward?

In my own spiritual practice, I have many ways of receiving information from my own helping spirits and tapping into my own spiritual wisdom. I engage in the practice of shamanic journeying. I receive a wealth of information as I sit quietly sipping a cup of tea. I take walks in nature and am guided by the spirits around me and feel my own inner spirit sharing so much with me. I channel spiritual and inspiring information while I do a variety of monotonous tasks throughout the day.

And another potent way for me to receive guidance is to ask for an answer to a question before I go to sleep at night knowing I might get a dream that will provide answers. I wrote about setting an intention for a dream in some of my books.

About a month ago I asked for a dream that would speak to what might be blocking the collective potential. And I did receive a message that night in a dream. The message I heard was, “You need to stop merging your spiritual work with science.”

When I woke up, I reflected on this message. I came to understand the word “science” to mean the rational and the intellectual.

For spirit is completely unlimited. When we can move our ego and rational mind out of the way to be a vessel for the power of the universe and the divine to flow through us all healing is possible. Shamans use a metaphor to describe this state as becoming a hollow bone.

But once we start to think about the possibilities of the miracles of spiritual work our mind moves into a place of limitation. We limit what spirit can do by trying to understand and rationalize. And this leads us to believe that miracles are impossible.

And as a collective we have given our power away to the scientific, intellectual and rational that continues to support our limiting beliefs.

I can imagine that most of you who have been reading The Transmutation News do want to shift out of a collective belief of limitations. And there is no better time than now.

We must dismember, discreate, dissolve the beliefs that we are holding that keep limiting us everytime we start to focus our imagination and our thoughts and words on the world we wish to dream into being.

Here are simple ways that you might work this month. The first step of course is to try and identify your limiting beliefs. Any limiting belief you have is also part of the collective belief.

Take a walk in nature or find a way to sit quietly in a space where you can reflect. You can put on some music that you find expands you beyond a rational state to a meditative state. Or you might find that the silence allows you to sink within. If you have a spiritual practice that assists you in traveling within and accessing your own intuitive knowing use this practice. If you have a way of accessing helping spirits, then use the practice you know. And of course, you can set an intention of asking for some guidance in a dream before going to sleep at night.

The question you want to hold as you engage in the spiritual practice that calls to you is: “What are my limiting beliefs and attitudes that prevent me from surrendering to the flow of unconditional love and divine light? What are the beliefs that I repeat throughout the day which tell me that miraculous healings for the planet are impossible?”

These are just some suggestions of questions to ask. And you might find that you feel there is a more appropriate way of wording the question that fits better for you personally.

The next step is to dismember/dissolve these beliefs. There are a variety of ways to work with this. And I do give examples of ceremonies for dissolving limiting beliefs in Medicine for the Earth and How to Thrive in Changing Times.

You can go outside and perform a ceremony where you allow the earth, air, water, or fire to transform your limiting belief(s) into light and love.

One of my helping spirits gave me a practice to write out my limiting beliefs and then use the product “white out” to literally white out that belief. This creates a blank screen/canvas for me to create from. As a limiting thought comes up, I imagine myself whiting it out over and over again until the power of the thought diminishes and disappears.

You can paint a picture of limitations and then paint over it with a healing and expansive image.

If you like to dance allow yourself to dance the feelings of limitation and then when ready change your movements to reflect feelings of freedom and being unlimited.

For those of you who engage in shamanic journeying you can journey to one of your helping spirits to ask for healing help to dismember the beliefs and attitudes you are holding.

If you don’t journey here is a way to work. Put on some relaxing and beautiful music. Lie or sit down. Imagine yourself sitting in a beautiful garden. Ask for a helping being to come to you who is willing to assist you. When your helping being comes ask the spirit to help you dissolve your limiting thoughts and attitudes that you have identified.

And as always allow the above suggestions to fuel your imagination to come up with your own way to work.

You might need to continue this discreation work over time. And holding to the belief in miracles it now might be time to acknowledge that the need for your limiting beliefs is over.

It is time for us to join together as a collective that surrenders to the unlimited healing that spirit can bring through. But we must let go of the old beliefs that keep binding us. It is time for us to step into our spiritual power.

As a collective we say that we want the best that life has to offer. We say we want healing for the earth and all of life. But we must reflect on what we continue to project.

Think of how many millions of people have been reading books and listening to lectures on the earth changes that are coming. What projection has been placed upon our planet and how can we change our projections?

Remember the quote from Emmet Fox that I have published a few times now:
“It is impossible to think one thing and produce another”.

Here is one example of how we project that Lauren Torres, a brilliant shamanic teacher, in Illinois wrote to me about.

“Hello Sandra.
I was thinking through what I know about shapeshifting the other day, and I had an insight about the Focus part of the transmutation formula that I wanted to share.

Since I am in the car alot, I used to practice shapeshifting with the traffic. I’d try to become the consciousness of moving traffic and shapeshift the traffic around me. I found that for the most part traffic is amenable to shapeshifting, because people are really there to join the existing pattern.

I did have one time where I absolutely could do nothing with the traffic. It was really bad, and not moving. While I sensed it did not have to be quite so bad, everyone was thinking about how bad the traffic was. People on the radio were talking about how bad the traffic was. In other words, every driver was so focused on the reality of the traffic being bad that it was not in any way amenable to a shapeshift. I felt that the focus of the other drivers anchored the reality of the bad traffic into existence.

Anyway, it occurred to me that focus serves as an anchor. If you focus too much on the wrong thing during a transfiguration, say you think about the disease instead of thinking of the body as perfectly healthy, this serves as an anchor to a reality that exists and does not allow the thing to change.”

In the old forms of esoteric healing, it is taught that when a healer focuses on a disease the healer joins in with the client to solidify the disease. For the healer now agrees that there is a problem fueling the power of the disease itself.

When a healer only sees the client in his/her divine perfection the spiritual part of the client that is radiant light can now flow through creating healing.

We can say the same about the earth itself. As we focus together on the divine light and perfection of the earth this what is reflected back to us.

And this is one of the core teachings of the Medicine for the Earth work.

Part of being able to project a new vision for the planet is being able to engage the depth of our senses to fuel our imagination and our creative abilities.

What I find is that as people feel worn down by life we move into a place where our senses become deadened. We are also surrounded by the media which provides images for us instead of allowing new beautiful and vivid images to arise from inside of us. We listen to music on mp3 players and I-Pods (for some people all day long) and we do not allow our inner music to play through us.

The key to using our imagination to create is to be able to engage our strong inner senses with our own vivid images, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings. We need to be able to create our own powerful movies with each of us living in the movie instead of simply watching the movie. And we need to fuel our senses with intense enthusiasm. We need to stop allowing the outside world to write our script and our new script must be born from our inner world. And we must use the depth of our senses to make our creations real.

I think that people operate as flat screened TVs. Where is the depth of our own senses? We are fed so much from the outer world. We need to allow our senses to bubble us through us. We must feed the outer world from the depth of our own senses filled with power and enthusiasm.

If we cannot get in touch with the true power of our own vivid images, our own internal songs of creation, the beauty of the fragrances we wish to smell, the taste of healthy food grown and cooked with love, and the feeling of touching the beauty of life there is no power in our creation. If our creation is not fueled by passion and enthusiasm there is no power in what we project into the world. And the world molds superficiality back to us as our creative work is superficial and lacks depth and power.

I feel so strongly that this is a vital missing piece. The creative work of so many of us simply lacks passion and depth. But at the same time we must have compassion for ourselves and find patience with this process. As many of us live disconnected from nature and surround ourselves with so much input from TV, computers, DVDs, CDs, etc. our own ability to get in touch with the depth of our senses is hidden.

Think about how many years we have been deadening our senses. We need to have the patience to awaken the depth of the wealth of our inner senses. We need to revive our passion and remember times in our life where we felt passion for something where enthusiasm fueled our lives.

Find times in the day when you can go within yourself and start to bring up your own vivid images and your own songs. Really try to focus on fragrances that you love and tastes that you enjoy. Imagine yourself walking around and touching with your hands different things that you love. Try and make your inner senses tangible. Do this a few minutes before you go to sleep or when you wake up. Try this for just a few minutes a day. The intensity with which you can experience the senses in your inner world will directly affect your ability to create what you want in the world you live in.

Here is an example. If you wish for healing to take place at a particular location on the planet imagine reading a newspaper article that announces that healing has already taken place. Feel the feel of the newspaper in your fingers. Smell the ink. Experience yourself smiling as you read the article out loud and hear the laughter of your friends as you share the good news.

As our lives and the planet keep going through intense changes many of us have been reflecting on the meaning of life. I think at some point we get to a place of feeling that focusing on the outer world does not create happiness. We realize that by collecting more in the material world does not create meaning and purpose. As we grow and evolve, we start to see that true meaning and wealth lies within. And I have been writing about this for the last few years on The Transmutation News and wrote about this in How to Thrive in Changing Times.

For myself as I keep journeying within and experiencing the wealth of my inner garden, I come to a place of finding meaning in being a channel of love and light. For what else is there as you evolve in your life’s journey?

Learning more techniques and methods for spiritual practice do become a distraction at some point as you continue on your spiritual path. At some point we must stop searching for more spiritual information. We must become all that we are learning.

In Medicine for the Earth, I share a Haitian proverb:
“The gods won’t appear, the magic won’t happen, if we are not living our real life. Studying life is not living life and therefore has no magic.”

Let us live each minute of our lives filled with honor, respect, and gratitude. Let us be a vessel of divine love and radiate light into the world as the sun and the stars above.

Let us be a bridge of the spiritual energies of the heavens and the earth.

Let us surrender to unconditional love and project that into the world. Let us experience our divine light and radiate this light throughout the web of life.

Our perception creates our reality. In Medicine for the Earth, I wrote that to change our perception we must experience the beauty in all things. This is a wonderful teaching and for many of us who have been so worn down by life it is not easy to experience this teaching on the cellular level that creates a true change in our reality.

Being worn down by life is part of a powerful initiation. For the egoic part of ourselves that keeps us separate from Source and oneness is what is being worn down. And this process allows our divine spirit to shine through us.

At some point as we feel that we are worn down and our way of life is no longer working we are now basically standing before a blank canvas where it is time to revision what we want to experience in life.

Allowing ourselves to see the beauty in all things is a great stance to take as we revision our lives. But how can we see the beauty around us if we don’t experience our own beauty?

And how can we experience our own inner beauty if we don’t feel true passion and joy for life?

I titled the first Transmutation News of 2011 “Choosing Joy” and I want us to continue on this theme.

Yes, there are many people who are suffering right now. We feel great compassion for all who are being challenged on so many levels. And a perspective we must look at is there also must be a number of us in the collective who can hold the space and help to be supportive by actually experiencing the beauty and the joy that life has to offer us.

And through experiencing so many personal and global challenges I think many of us start to lose passion. Passion is a strong energy of feeling. And when we start to lose that kind of energy life takes on a very superficial quality.

I would like to share a story with you. In the 1970’s I went to San Francisco State University as a returning student. I had decided to get a BA in Biology specializing in Marine Biology. I have always loved the green of life and love plants, trees, all that grows out of the earth. I decided to study the plants that grow in seawater and engaged in the study of sea algae.

I had a professor who taught me so much about being passionate. He was one of the world’s specialists in algae. And he was going to be retiring shortly. He had devoted his whole career to algae.

As part of our grade as a class we would go to different beaches along the coast of Northern California and individually we each had to collect different algae that were on a list given to us.

I still remember my experience so vividly as if it was just yesterday. Every time one of us would find an algae on the list our professor would come over to that person and he would get so excited and would literally start laughing and would jump with joy. Of course, each of us would start to jump with joy with him while standing on the great ocean rocks that would reveal themselves in the low tide.

When was the last time you jumped with joy? We watch children do it all the time. How much of the beauty of life are we missing as we stopped jumping for joy?

The earth, the waters of the world, the air, and the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets above celebrate as we experience joy for life. And this is healing for the entire web of life.

This month find a time when you can go into nature and revel in the wonder and joy of life. If you can’t do this physically then do this with your eyes closed using the great power of your imagination. Awaken your inner senses to fuel the power of your imagination.

Dance in joy with the beauty of nature you experience around you. Remember all the imaginary beings you knew as a child – the fairies, the hidden folk, the spirit beings who radiated glittering light. Dance with them in joy. This can be figuratively or physically. The key is to get the feeling of joy in your body.

Move away from a place of feeling tired and drained and focusing on the challenges and the energy of scarcity. Allow the energy of bounty and limitless light and joy to flow through you. It might be a stretch at first but let the power of your imagination provide the fuel you need.

Remind yourself to imagine engaging in celebration throughout the day and each and every day. Let’s explore together and experience the joyful adventure of life. Let’s feed the web of life with joy this month.

Again, this is not to deny all that is happening in the world. In nature as we watch death and transitions there is always new birth popping up through the earth reminding us of the hope of new life. As we watch people die around us we are also surrounded by new babies born and we celebrate new birth.

We must rebalance our lives by grieving what has been lost and at the same time remembering the incredible joy, hope, and passion of the new coming in.

Life without passion leads to despair. Let’s celebrate life. As we remember how to jump with joy again then we can perceive the beauty in life around us.

As we experience joy and passion for life and for our creations our divine light radiates through us effortlessly. Let’s bring joy into our ceremony together on the full moon May 17 as we continue to weave a web of light within and throughout the earth.

If you are new to reading the Transmutation News please read “Creating A Human Web of Light” on the homepage of this site.

Years ago, a friend of mine in France sent me a quote that I keep on my desk. I hope it is helpful to you:

“Life is not waiting for storms to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.”